Tuesday, January 11, 2011

I never got around to doing this in the last couple of weeks since 2011 has stormed in, but I have a few minutes here during my lunch break, so I thought I would ramble on about what is to come here on the blog, and for Jason Richards Publishing.

2010 was great, and saw some good things happen. Wrote a little for Palladium, turned in my manuscript for Chaos Earth: First Responders, established Jason Richards Publishing, and for the first time did writing and publishing work under my own banner. Artists were employed, products were created, and sales were made. All very, very exciting for me.

Now what? Sales of Complete Characters have been very encouraging, and well received. However, there's no time to rest on those laurels, and it's high time that this project moved forward. Forward in this case means adding stats from various game systems to the Complete Characters. Utilizing the Open Gaming License, most characters will soon see a d20 stat sheet added to the end of the character. Stats will be given for each character at low, medium, and high levels to best fit with any campaign.

I currently have designs for d20 character sheets nearly done, and may develop Open D6 character sheets as well. That's the next step for that particular project. I should probably mention that there are still five free downloads for Complete Characters, and the rest are still on sale for only 50 cents each for a very limited time; once the characters are updated with d20 stats, those will be provided to you for free if you've already bought them, so this is a good chance to pick them up cheap.

There are other projects in the vein of Complete Characters, featuring other gaming materials, but announcements to those ends will have to wait. Plus, there are the changes and upgrades and streamlining of this site that will inevitably be neglected.

I also need to do some actual gaming this year. I have a killer Star Wars D6 campaign just totally ready to go, and I've been dying to run it for a smallish group of friends. Not to mention, I need to get a game group together and warmed up to prepare for the next issue.

I'm very excited about a large project, however, which will be my first foray into designing a game setting for publication, from the ground up. With a couple of colleagues, I'll be designing a game using the Mini Six system that I think fans of my work will really enjoy. A working title for this game is Breach, and it will be a highly-cinematic, action-packed setting with lots of danger, intrigue, and character. Expect "kitchen sink" gaming of the highest order, where anything goes, but with some built-in direction to help center the world and create a common point for conflict and intrigue. Using Mini Six will allow us to jump right in to building our sandbox and not having to worry about breaking in a new ruleset. Its methods of character generation will also eliminate the need for us to create a ton of specific character classes in favor of writing up a few examples and then letting the players and Game Masters run with it; one less thing to worry about in the design stage.

And hey, look at that... a post of less than ten pages! That's why we call it a Quick Hit, folks. What do you think? Will this be the best year ever? What are your gaming or writing or blogging goals? Anything you want to see from yours truly?

3
comments:

About my only goal is to finish up my WIP game that's been going since...well, last January. Though, with school it has been back burnered a couple of times. Still, play-test campaigns were very promising, so hopefully I can finish it up and figure out what to do with it once that is over.